“Nobody wanted to talk about it. This happened during the time of three presidents, and frankly I’m not so sure to blame them either. This was hidden, which is why it spread,” Quinones said. “It’s only basically the last two or three years that people have been paying any attention to it, and that’s not a reasonable assumption that in three years that you would resolve this major problem that’s been festering for almost a generation.”

State epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy says it’s difficult to pinpoint what is causing the high numbers, but the southern hemisphere had a similarly severe influenza season. She says that could be impacting Colorado due to international trave

“We now have emerging evidence in Medicare and commercial insurance of how care coordination and prevention can help patients with chronic conditions avoid costly hospitalizations and ER visits,” said Kavita Patel, a policy expert at the Brookings Institution who’s also a practicing physician. “This really should become the standard across Medicaid programs.”

“The most important thing about this study is that it’s moving us to individualized screening as opposed to what we have now, which is one-size-fits-all screening,” predicted study chair Dr. Etta Pisano, a radiologist at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

The poor and elderly are most threatened by worsening climate change, but there remains “glimmers of progress” especially after the 2015 Paris agreement to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new big study published Monday in the British medical journal Lancet